This morning, my inductive backbrain plugged together a bunch of input related to the ongoing conversations on cultural appropriation, story structure, feminist thought, and reading protocols, to advance the following hypothesis:
Othering is a luxury.
To explain more fully: If one is at the top of the social heap, one is in a position where it is not only nonessential to understand the positions of people different from one's self, but also easier to disregard the validity of those positions. As a woman in modern society, I have to understand the male perspective if I am going to succeed in navigating society. They, on the other hand, have the luxury of making a parlor game of wondering "what women want," and so forth--because they are not forced to understand the dominant (and external) paradigm. Not just forced to understand--constantly pressured to subscribe to it and support it, even when it's not in our own best interests.
The same goes for religious, sexual, ethnic, and social minorities.
And this ties directly into the reasons why it is easier for women to write good male characters (not that all women do--not that all women write good female characters!) than it is for men to write good women characters. Why it's easier for blacks to write good white characters than vice versa. Why it's easier, in short, to write up the imposed social ladder than down.
Because we are forced to understand people who are not like us. Whereas, if we are higher on the social heap, we have the luxury of believing that we are right and they are, if not wrong, at least deviant from the norm.
This also, not incidentally, explains a lot of world politics. Because the guys running the show and trying to negotiate with their opposite numbers are also the ones who have othered most of the human race--they are, in the US, overwhelmingly straight, wealthy, privileged, Protestant white males. And they really don't understand that what a single black mother of three with no high school education wants is to go to bed at night not worrying that her kids are hungry or coming down with something, or god forbid, she's getting sick and her mother's getting old and might not be able to watch the kids during the day much longer.
They are not trained, in other words, to step into her shoes. They have no understanding of the challenges she faces on a daily basis, and that the level playing field that they presume as a birthright is a glass mountain to her.
I'm as successful as I am in life because I do what I refer to as "passing for white." (By which I mean, well-spoken, middle-class, unradical, and so forth. This is the actual life skill they teach you in college, by the way--it's how to act like the lower echelons of the ruling class.) If I didn't have that knack for mimicry?
God knows where I'd be now.
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Comments
Shouldn't that last word be "harder"? (Given what you say elsewhere.)
Fixed! Thanks!
*Nods* I was an inner-city kid in the UK at a time when I had the wrong accent and was the wrong sex to get on in life. But as you say, secondary school and university were all about learning to "pass".
But then of course you run into the problems of being cut off from one's roots and can end up feeling that you don't really belong anywhere any more.
Alienation.
At that point, there's nothing for it except to become an anthropologist or a science fiction writer.
In Scottish Country Dance, it's said that the women are better dancers than the men because women will dance on either side of the dance if there aren't enough men to go around, and therefore know how to dance either the men's or women's parts. Men are less likely to dance the women's parts, both because there are rarely more men than women, and because some guys just *won't*.
(My very best flirting partner is a guy who will dance on the women's side, and I adore him for that.)
Also, generally better lovers.
Just saying.
I'm a north Georgia hillbilly who grew up as the smartest person in my school, and self-educated by reading whatever I could find. I was a National Merit Scholar, etc, etc. So I went out into the world expecting people to react to my intelligence...
...and found that instead, they judged me by my accent (and therefore, my perceived social-economic class). It was so weird to me that it actually took me a long time to figure out what the problem was.
Anyone who has (shudder) tried to mediate a rabid dispute between a group of female Nigerian students and a group of female Chinese students will be rapidly disabused of the view that racism, sexism and classism are the prerogative of the western white male. The WWMs are just the ones who get to act out on it more effectively.
I'm sure I'll get flak somewhere for saying that. But I bet anyone who has ever taught in a language school might be nodding their heads...
Think about how a white person typically responds to being called a honky or how a man might react to being called a slut and you might get the idea.
Where I disagree, is that I think the groups with less power still often participate in "othering"; they may understand how the others work and why, but are still prone to regard them as part of an institution rather than a person with thoughts and feelings. It's understandable and maybe a little justified to not want to consider the common humanity of someone whose group is exploiting yours, but I think it still qualifies as othering.
but yeah, other than that nitpick, your point stands.
Not one day of my adult life has passed that I haven't been amazed at how poorly Danes and Greenlanders understand each other. It's worse for Greenlanders, of course. It's not healthy for the tightrope walker to be misunderstood by the person who's holding the rope. -- Peter Høeg
(So much of that book is about passing...)
and speak.
There's a nice demonstration of identificatory process and gendered othering in The Celluloid Closet. I believe it's in chapter 2 that Russo lays out how a woman dressing in masculine attire is cool -- she's attempting to climb the gender hierarchy -- while a man acting womanly is horrifying, awful, a wilful leap downward in status. This is why all gay male movie characters had to die at the end, at least until about 1995.
If you really want to make your eyes bleed, there's Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay about the male gaze, which in a lot of ways is a cornerstone of modern feminist film theory: who is the presumed viewer? Is the person up on the screen meant to be lusted for, or identified with? (I say eye-bleeding, because it's a dense, theoretical essay. Needless to say, also an angry one.)
I'm mostly talking about myself, of course--when I find myself othering or exoticizing somebody/something, I think it is about privilege. Something I need to think about, I think.
That's not to say that there weren't people churning out stuff that could be considering romanticising the upper classes (the silver fork novel eg) as exotic others, but that's probably a distinct and different phenomenon.
Edith Wharton, for example -- an ultimate high-society insider -- except for the fact that she was a woman who wrote serious fiction, which made her a freak in her place and time.
And two of the artists who rebelled against the controlling Parisian artistic establishment and reinvented painting itself, partly by painting scenes of modern-day urban middle-class life instead of mythical or historical subject matter, were Manet and Degas, both of whom were upper-middle-class.
So I'm wondering if being an artist makes you an outsider, due to the very nature of the quest; or maybe you're born with that outsider personality that attracts you into art in the first place.
To look at my life -- now -- you would think that I am an 'insider', because I'm certainly privileged on just about every level (several of which happened accidentally). But that would not be accurate.
Hell -- thanks for giving me this to think about. I have an essay due for a website soon and maybe I'll write about this. :)
You see this played out in minature scale in high school: it's the outsiders, or the kids on the lower rungs of the social ladder, who can explain in detail and with insight how the cliques arrange themselves, who's in power and who's far from, etc. They're the ones who know who everyone is, can point out who sits where in the cafeteria. The popular kids will shrug and say, "Huh?"
As a Canadian who's been living in the States for close to ten years now, the same general phenom. is also extremely apparent in how little most Americans know about my country, vs. how much my country knows about theirs -- how many Americans can name our Prime Minister (or even know we have a PM rather than a President)? or how many provinces we have (or that we have provinces rather than states)?, or actually name the majority of those provinces, or speak with any insight about the conflicted attitude Canadians have towards Americans? In general Americans seem content to make lame jokes -- "Canada, isn't that the 51st State?" -- "We should have taken you guys over way back when" (uh, note: you guys tried, and failed, it was called the War of 1812, there might be a couple of sentences about it in your high school history text) -- as if every Canadian in this country has *not* already heard those jokes fifteen million times. Americans assume Canadians are basically Americans, and laugh it off when Canadians get pissed by this -- but understanding Canada in any real sense would be 'looking down', and it's not human nature to do this. Neither is it human nature to react very well to being so disregarded -- but there's nothing like power and wealth and the company of your wealthy friends to keep you insulated from the unpleasant masses -- to keep you looking at each other, and up.
and thank you.
DINGDINGDINGDING
I remember reading something v like that in a long-vanished civics sociology textbook -- I think it was an essay, possibly Marxist-based -- which basically said something like the people at the _bottom_ of the power/social structure _have_ to understand the people up at the top, because sometimes their v lives depend on it. Also, just as you talk about mimicry in that last paragraph, it is a lot more desirable -- in some sense "easier" -- to pick up the mannerisms of the people on top, because those will help you survive better. (Hence also all the social anxiety in a lot of British Victorian novels about being able to tell someone's proper social station, Becky Sharp's social-climbing and all that.) But for people on the top, there's no reason for them to understand the people on the bottom -- for the Victorian (I just know a small amt about Victorian sociology) housemistress, frex, not to worry so much about the state of her maids -- in fact, it's easier for _them_, necessary almost to preserve the power structure, if they don't know about/worry about the people at the bottom of the pile.
But you expanded on that v v nicely. And explained something fundamental about politics to me: I always go off in a shrieking rage about how the guys at the top do short-sighted stuff in their own interest. But "the ones who have othered most of the human race" sums it up quite neatly.
However, I've also run into a few people in the upper echelons of various political processes who give every appearance of understanding the lives of the people below them. But what they don't do is care.
I think that as writers, in the business of entering other people's lives and minds, we sometimes think that understanding is equivalent to empathy, or will automatically generate it. Alas, not so.
Historically there did exist groups of people to whom this skill was (and still is to some extent) essential: travelling merchants (and by travelling I mean country to county not door to door), diplomats, and the most brilliant of generals. Funny how I find writing about them to be most fullfilling.
One of the few male authors who can write down is Trollope; I've speculated that he was so empathetic with Victorian women because he himself had had the experience of being an outsider growing up.
However:
And this ties directly into the reasons why it is easier for women to write good male characters (not that all women do--not that all women write good female characters!) than it is for men to write good women characters.
Not being a fiction writer, I can't speak to whether it's "easier" for women. But as for who writes "good female characters," I guess it depends on your value of "good." Over the many years, I have identified with far more female characters written by men than by women (yes, allowing for proportion of male to female authors). And the female characters who are most likely to make me want to throw the book across the room are usually written by women.
Of course, I'm not a "typical" woman. Any time someone announces a female/male dichotomy, I'm fairly likely to be on the male side of it. And in reading any fiction, by men or women, I'm more likely to identify with a male character than a female one.
But I am a woman, and have never thought of myself (when I think of it at all) as anything else. I have none of the feelings that my transgender friends and acquaintances have talked about; I have always felt completely right in my body. Sometimes, though, it seems as if I don't "count" when people talk about "women" and "men."
I feel a bit like Gloria Steinem may have when she said, "This is what 50 looks like." I am a woman, and this is the way I am, so this is the way women are. Not all women, not most women, but still, women.
(Think I'll take this over to my own :J.)
You know what, thank you for this post.
I'm mixed. Actually, I suppose the proper current term, if there is one, is multiracial (I much prefer this term to having to check the very blunt term "other", trust me). I'm also a woman. Add to the bag the fact that I grew up in a government assisted home for the elderly & disabled and come from a lower economic class background, well, it all makes sense why I'm a *skilled parrot.* I used to feel ashamed about my abilities to mimic the accents of other people, to take on a sinful amount of voices for characters when writing and to discern precisely where someone comes from/their ethnic background by a mere once over-- like I lacked an authentic soul because I could poke through human categories so well and could profit from that ability. I forgot about all this, all this past guilt because of these "other" issues. Reading your post allowed me to revisit some these issues through the viewpoint of these skills being adaptive.
Thanks,
madeyedmongoose@hotmail.com
That ability to code-switch that can seem so inauthentic to us is a gift, even if it derives from trauma. I said a while back that if I could go back and prevent my ten year old self from enduring some of the trauma she did, I'm not sure I would do it.
Because the person who emerged might be less damaged--she might be happier and cleaner of soul--but she wouldn't have some of the power I do.
So, yeah.
It may bear mentioning that this more or less describes the dynamic on the empowered side as well; cf. Patriarchy Hurts Men Too.
Of course, there's an argument to be made that once you're inclined to question the dominant paradigm, you're edging over to Other anyway. Which is not to suggest that every Sensitive Progressive White Male gets to always say "But I'm oppressed tooooooo!" whenever this stuff comes up.
But I've been thinking a lot about the extent to which it's possible, when it's possible, to reject privelege, and what can be accomplished by refusing to play the game. There are ways in which I suspect real progress doesn't get made until a significant number of people on the empowered side of the aisle are willing to Other themselves in real ways.
This is one reason, of course, why issues of appropriation are so touchy and complicated.
I think I agree with this wholeheartedly.
There's that great scene at the end of In & Out where all the kids stand up and say "But I'm gay!"
Passing for white works, even if you aren't white. When I look at my old class photos, I stick out like a sort thumb among all the tall, fair kids. I was never treated or seen any differently, though. Last time when I went home, I was concerned about the tense situation with the Muhammed drawings and asked my friends how the situation was for "different looking people" and did they think it would be a problem for me...and they went "Why would that be a problem for you?" They really didn't realise that I did not look like them until I explained it to them. Complete mimicry. :)
You said it much more eloquently, though, I think.
Well, I'm off to go ponder the futility of my own life and career now.
NB that I am not disagreeing with you.
hm. ya know, i buy this for ethnic, religious, sexual/gender minorities, but not entirely for the big gender divide. here's why: caucasians in the US don't have to care and know what people of colour want and go through. they can live their entire lives without giving a second thought to the experience of non-whites, and without actually interacting on a meaningful level with anyone who's of a clearly different skin colour.
on the other hand, what women want is still quite important to most men, and much more than a parlor game. they grow up having a mother, having sisters. if they're heterosexual, they have to interact with women not only for sex, but also to be married to, and start a family with. men cannot go through life completely oblivious to women's experiences.
women are not actually a minority, they're all around men. and that changes the dynamic you're describing.
the part about not identifying with the black woman with 3 kids is also about class in addition to sex and ethnicity, isn't it? and possibly more about class than about the other groupings. the guys and gals who run the country have no more of a clue what it's like for a young black man in harlem who's trying to provide for his family either. in fact i am surprised you left class out of your list.
The dominant powers are the ones "doing it right", and less powerful minorities internalize that imagery and ask themselves where they've failed to come up to "the standards." (Never mind that the stardards are organized specifically to exclude as many others as it possibly can, a fact that is rarely analyzed or articulated.)
It takes a long time before you get to the defiant counter-statement that "we're okay in our own right, we look okay and we're beautiful in our own way, never mind what the Man is saying."
Also, everybody else has a clearer idea of what the master's mental processes are than he does (because they *have* to, to survive), while he has no frickin' clue what his underlings are dealing with, and rarely cares, and if he did ask too many questions, he'd make them nervous that he's trying to find new ways to control and exploit them.
Not to mention that it's icky to play nicey-nice and then turn around and do horrible ignorant things to them.
I see these reactions among the folks I ride teh train with every day.
They're very careful how they treat us privileged pale people.
Very careful.